Neoliberalism

Read an interesting article after Trump got elected. With the way various countries are voting against globalisation, makes me feel how much this has to do with the trend. It's most interesting the rural areas vote for these aspects while the cities vote for the Hillarys of the world.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Also, where does the world head if this anti globalisation trend continues?

Read an interesting article after Trump got elected. With the way various countries are voting against globalisation, makes me feel how much this has to do with the trend. It's most interesting the rural areas vote for these aspects while the cities vote for the Hillarys of the world.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Also, where does the world head if this anti globalisation trend continues?

Once all the infrastructure and services owned by the State are sold-off to the private sector it is easy to ask the question - what is the point of government?

If it just there to administer and let the 'market forces' make all the hard policy decisions then why not privatise administration and out source Australia to India, China, or some enormous legal firm?

Thegreater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

Absolutely idiotic to believe that millions of India's poor have not benefited from globalisation. You have to wilfully ignore the literature or if you live here then never meet a poor person in your life.

Absolutely idiotic to believe that millions of India's poor have not benefited from globalisation. You have to wilfully ignore the literature or if you live here then never meet a poor person in your life.

The UN released a report to that effect. Not that it's the system that spreads wealth most evenly, but where it is implemented, there is the quickest rise in GDP per capita.

The Neoliberal policies that have gutted the public sector and deregulated most Western economies since Reagan and Thatcher have inevitibly given rise to the current right-wing populists within the Western political system. I think that this idea is now pretty obvious in hindsight.

But how does a government actually begin to re-nationalise in reality? That's the difficult bit.

For example, its not as if the Australian government can say, "Our copper wire, our poles, our infrastructure paid for by the Australian tax payer over generations - we demand Telstra back".

While the public sector is being gutted, wage growth in the U.K. is sluggish, and poverty — especially child poverty — is on the rise. As*The Guardian put it, “Poverty in the UK is increasing after two years of heavy welfare cuts have helped to push hundreds of thousands of people below the breadline.”

It’s no coincidence that the Brexit vote comes in the same week that newspaper headlines read “UK poverty levels rise for first time in nearly a decade.” Things are getting worse, not better, and everyone recognizes it. They want change, but have few options to choose from.

Right-wing proponents of the Leave campaign, like the far-right throughout the world, have taken advantage of the widespread anger at these growing economic problems and directed that rage at migrants, outsiders and multiculturalism, instead of at the neoliberal policies that have fueled them.

Meanwhile, for years, both mainstream parties in the U.K., the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, have adopted neoliberal economics — that is to say, hyper-capitalist policies like privatization, deregulation and cuts in public spending, policies that shrink the state and give more power to corporations in its place.

Even the U.S. government, which has been implementing its own neoliberal policies for years, urged the E.U. this week to “ease off on austerity.”

“It would be wise from the perspective of job growth and economic growth more generally to ease off on austerity,” a U.S. official said, indirectly admitting that E.U.-imposed neoliberalism has fueled support for Brexit..........

We live in an incredibly dangerous moment. It is not hyperbolic to say Europe is going through political changes similar to those of the post-Depression 1930s, when fascism was on the rise for the first time.

Brexit is a big victory for neo-fascist forces throughout the West — actual neo-fascist parties and politicians. And there is no sign that the far-right will decline anytime soon.

Demagogues like Trump in the U.S., or Marine Le Pen in France, or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, may lose the upcoming election, but there will be many more elections after that, and the far-right will only continue to gain strength — unless it faces a real challenge.

A leftist resistance must assert itself in opposition to these growing forces of reaction. The enormous popularity of Corbyn, Sanders and others shows how millions of average people recognize that the system is not working for them, and they want a socialist alternative.

Yet a critical obstacle is in place: Mainstream, centrist parties like the Labour Party in the U.K. or the Democratic Party in the U.S. are actively cannibalizing themselves, viciously attacking any leftists who criticize their neoliberal leadership.

In the process, they are only pouring more fuel onto the fascist fire — a fire that will burn all of us, and the world.

Globalism is by and large a good thing but I'm not sure why that's being equated to neoliberalism?

Much of the country's infrastructure - rail, ports, power networks, postal and telecommunication networks etc - was paid for, and then built by prior generations - their tax money and their hard work.

Then Neoliberal goverments come along and sell-off the infracture to foreign companies to raise much needed capital - that's the Globalisation bit. They do this because NeoCon dogma says that taxes are an evil thing and the government shouldn't be allowed to raise revenue that way.

The fact is, infrastructure is not for the Government's to sell as it belongs to mutiple generations of people who built it in good faith. But rather than nurture it, and use it constructively to make an honest profit that goes directly back to the people the Neoliberals would rather make a fast buck. The tragedy is that there is no going back once sold - a piece of the nation's history is gone forever.

Personally, this makes me so angry that I am prepared to vote for any alt right politician that comes along. I would go with my natural instincts and vote left, but the left died shortly after Hawke and Keating came to power in the early 80s. Those years were the biggest betrayal in the history of Australian politics. I detest them both.